I think this has a lot less to do with taxes than it does with the prices of real estate. Buying a house in California is prohibitively expensive for most people, which eats up a huge amount of everyone's disposable income. In Texas, you make less money, but houses and rent are a factor of 2-4 times cheaper for what you get.<p>I think there are two main reasons for this: proposition 13 and CEQA. Prop 13 keeps property taxes really low, which makes buying and holding onto single-family homes really cheap. This is a giant subsidy for people who have lived in California for a while, but jacks up the prices for everyone else who gets in after them, since low ownership costs translate to high upfront prices.<p>The California Environmental Quality Act has a different effect that also raises housing prices: empowering NIMBYs. Because any new development can be pretty easily be slowed down/made more expensive/stopped altogether by a bogus CEQA request, new housing isn't getting built in nearly as much as one would expect given the demand. This makes existing housing more valuable, which increases prices even more.<p>In addition, some municipalities, notably San Francisco, have an insanely regulated rental market that makes renting incredibly difficult for a landlord, which makes it more attractive for people to buy housing instead of rent. This means there's less rental housing to go around, which makes the rent in SF absolutely insane.